Francisco, CA, 2010) — Video at https://gdcvault.com/play/1012204/Sporadic-Play-The-History-
and — accessed July 24, 2021.
Cash, Bryan and Gibson, Jeremy “Sporadic Play Update: The Latest Developments in Games for
Busy People” (presented at the Game Developers Conference Online, Austin, TX, 2010) — Video
at https://gdcvault.com/play/1013822/Sporadic-Play-Game-Update-The — accessed July 24, 2021.
8 Skyrates was developed over the course of two semesters in 2006 while we were all graduate
students at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. The developers were
Howard Braham, Bryan Cash, Jeremy Gibson (Bond), Chuck Hoover, Henry Clay Reister, Seth
Shain, and Sam Spiro, with character art by Chris Daniel. Our faculty advisors were Jesse Schell
and Dr. Drew Davidson. After Skyrates was released, we added the developers Phil Light and Jason
Buckner. The website is http://skyrates.net, though sadly it is now impossible to play Skyrates due
to Adobe retiring Flash.
9 Skyrates won the Silver Gleemax Award for Strategic Games at the 2008 Independent Game
Festival and the 2008 Best of Casual Gameplay Editors’ and Audience award for Simulation Game
on http://jayisgames.com.
As designers in the industry at the time, we were witnessing the rise of
social media games like FarmVille and the like that seemed to have little or
no respect for their players’ time. It was commonplace for games on social
networks to demand (through their mechanics) that players log in to the
game continually throughout the day, and players were punished for not
returning to the game on time. This was accomplished through a few
nefarious mechanics, the chief of which were energy and spoilage.
In social network games with energy as a resource, the player’s energy level
built slowly over time regardless of whether they was playing or not, but
there was a cap on the energy that could be earned by waiting, and that cap
was often considerably less than the amount that could be accrued in a day
and also less than the amount needed to accomplish the optimal player
actions each day. The result was that players were required to log in several
times throughout the day to spend the energy that had accrued and not
waste potential accrual time on capped-out energy. Of course, players were
also able to use real money to purchase additional energy that was not
capped and did not expire, and this drove a large amount of the sales in
these games.
The spoilage mechanic is best explained through FarmVille, in which
players could plant crops and were required to harvest them later. However,
if a crop was left unharvested for too long, it would spoil, and the player
would lose their investment in both the seeds and the time spent to grow
and nurture the crop. For higher-value crops, the delay before spoilage was
drastically less than that of low-value, beginner-level crops, so habitual